Workplace Pensions

Our Services

The legislation brought in a few years ago in respect of workplace pensions has so far only affected large employers. However, it is now to apply to even the smallest employers who may only have a single employee. All employers, including employers of nannies, are affected by this. The requirements are quite complex and rather bureaucratic and, in keeping with recent trends, failure or lateness in complying with the requirements will mean that the employer is likely to incur substantial penalties which will be levied by the Pensions Regulator.

Whether you need to operate a pension to comply with the new automatic enrolment legislation, or whether you want to offer a pension to your employee on a discretionary basis, PAYE for Nannies will be able to help.

With all levels of subscription we can include the necessary pension contributions on the payslip at no extra cost but for those employers wanting more support, we offer two services that will take much of the administrative burden away from you:

With our managed service we take the headache of dealing with the Pensions Regulator and the pension provider away from you. We exclusively use NEST (the national provider set up by the government employee savings trust) as our pension provider. As part of the service we make all of the necessary declarations to NEST each month as well as handling the statutory communications with both the Pensions Regulator and your employee. Payments to NEST are taken by Direct Debit and we will instruct NEST to take payment automatically as part of the normal payroll run.

Premier Pensions Service (£48/mth, including a full payroll subscription):

The Premier Pensions Service is our flagship offering that takes all of the management of both the payroll and the pension out of your hands. As with our managed service above, we handle all the communications with NEST and the Pensions Regulator but we will additionally make all of the payments on your behalf. This will include the payments to the employee, the payments to HMRC in respect of the tax and NI as well as the pension contributions to NEST.

Automatic Enrolment

The rules surrounding automatic enrolment are quite complex but we have summarised the most important details below.

Under automatic enrolment, all employers will receive a ‘staging date’ from the Pensions Regulator. This will be the date from which you must comply with the rules for automatic enrolment. At the staging date you would need to assess your employee’s pay (amongst other qualifcation criteria such as age). For most employees it will come down to their level of pay as to whether they need to be enrolled or not.

If your employee is paid below £5,824 gross per annum at this point, you will not be obliged to automatically enrol them in a pension scheme though you will still have to submit documents to the Pensions Regulator (e.g. a declaration of compliance). It is unfortunately not the case that you can ignore the pension regulations at this level of pay.

If your employee is paid between £5,824 and £10,000 gross per annum, your employee can ask you to enrol them in a pension and you would not be able to refuse this request. You would only be obliged to do this on request though as no automatic action is required on your part (though a declaration of compliance would still be required as above).

If your employee is paid above £10,000 gross per annum then you would need to automatically enrol them into a pension scheme regardless of whether they have expressed a desire to be enrolled or not.

After having been enrolled, your employee can opt-out of the pension scheme but this cannot happen until after the enrolment process.

Voluntary / Discretionary Pensions

If your staging date is some time in the future, this does not prevent you from offering a pension to your employee on a voluntary or discretionary basis. We can help you account for this with any necessary amendments to the contract as well as advising on how to set everything up through our preferred pension provider (NEST) and with the Pensions Regulator. We are also able to advise on how this can be done to enable a smooth transition once the requirement for automatic enrolment kicks in.